Show HN: Configure your own 3D-printed microscope

Hey HN, the OpenFlexure Microscope is a 3D-printed microscope with a precision moveable stage using plastic flexure hinges. The stage can be hand-actuated or motorised using low-cost unipolar stepper motors. Using our user friendly microscopy client it makes for a nice entry level robotic microscope. With our partners in Tanzania we currently have a study running to use a fleet of these microscopes to improve Malaria diagnosis. (More details in the overview paper [0].)

We mostly use the version with a Raspberry Pi and associated camera but you can also use a hacked a webcam for an extremely low-cost low-resolution version.

It's all designed in the programmatic CAD tool OpenSCAD and there are a lot of different parameters and options. That's why I built this web-app so you can configure desired microscope and download exactly the right STL files to 3D-print. It uses VueJS (my first VueJS project) and Semantic UI and our custom 3D file viewer [1], source code is on Gitlab [2].

[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/861856v1

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitbuilding/gbviewer

[2]: https://gitlab.com/openflexure/microscope-stls.openflexure.o...